Description

The setting is the seashore and as the author picks up shells she reflects how each symbolizes a facet of her development as a woman from young love to middle age and studies the ebb and flow of human relationships and upholds the importance of the free and individual spirit of woman and man.show more

About Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Anne Morrow Lindbergh was born in 1906 in New Jersey. She married aviator Charles Lindbergh, and became a renowned aviator in her own right. In 1932, the couple's first baby, Charles, was kidnapped and found dead. The incident caused a media furore, and the Lindberghs retreated to England, and later to an island off the coast of Brittany, before returning to the US in 1938. Anne Morrow Lindbergh's many books (including biographies, poetry, general non-fiction and diaries) won her several prestigious awards and A Gift from the Sea made her a household name for a generation of women. Anne Morrow Lindbergh spent her final years in her Connecticut home, continuing her writing projects and enjoying visits from her children and grand-children. She died on February 7, 2001, at the age of ninety-four.show more

Review Text

An Intensely personal book in which, nonetheless, every thoughtful woman will find a reflection of her own half- realized frustrations and answers. It took a holiday alone by the sea in Florida (one guesses an island in the Gulf) to face the recuperative values of loneliness, the necessity of finding a means to shut out the demands of the world- family, community, activities, social and otherwise,- in order to replenish the drained wells. She has used shells found on the sands as symbols,- the perfect, self-contained beauty of the channeled walk, the delicate perfection of a double sunrise shell, the sturdy practicality of an oyster, the fragile, exquisite artistry of a paper mautilus to supply a design for the stages of a woman's life pattern, her balance in personal and human relationships. A beautiful book, written with the limpid prose that reflects the clarity of her philosophy. ??This might be a today's A ROOM OF ONES OWN.?? (Kirkus Reviews)show more

Review quote

"Read it -- it will be one of your happiest discoveries" Sainsbury's Magazine "A modern classic" Good Book Guideshow more